About the Authors

Emily Robinson

WRITTEN BY JACQUELINE NOLIS

Emily Robinson is a brilliant senior data scientist at Warby Parker and previously worked at DataCamp and Etsy.

I first met Emily at Data Day Texas 2018, when she was one of the few people who attended my talk on data science in industry. At the end of my speech, she shot her hand up and asked a great question. To my surprise, an hour later we had swapped; I was watching her calmly and casually give a great presentation while I was eagerly waiting to raise my hand and ask her a question. That day, I knew she was a hard-working and clever data scientist. A few months later, when it came time for me to find someone to co-author a book, she was at the top of my list. When I sent her the email asking whether she would be interested, I figured that there was a good chance she would say no; she was probably out of my league.

Working with Emily on this book has been a joy. She is deeply thoughtful about the struggles of junior data scientists and has the ability to clearly understand what is important. She is constantly getting her work done and somehow also is able to squeeze out extra blog posts while doing it. Now having seen her at more conferences and social events, I’ve watched as she’s talked to many data scientists and made all of them feel comfortable and welcome. She’s also an expert in A/B testing and experimentation, but it’s clear that this just happens to be the area she’s working in at the moment; she could pick up any other part of data science and be an expert in that if she wanted to.

My only disappointment is that I’m writing these words about her at the end of creating the book, and with us finishing, someone besides me will have the next opportunity to collaborate with her.

Jacqueline Nolis

WRITTEN BY EMILY ROBINSON

Whenever someone asks me whether I would recommend writing a book, I always say, “Only if you do it with a co-author.” But that’s not actually the full picture. It should be “Only if you do it with a co-author who is as fun, warm, generous, smart, experienced, and caring as Jacqueline.” I’m not sure what it’s like working with a “normal” co-author, because Jacqueline has always been amazing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to work with her on this project.

It would be easy for someone as accomplished as Jacqueline to be intimidating. She has a PhD in industrial engineering, got $100,000 for winning the third season of the reality television show King of the Nerds, was a director of analytics, and started her own successful consulting firm. She’s spoken at conferences across the country and is regularly asked back by her alma mater to advise math undergraduates (her major) on careers. When she spoke at an online conference, the compliments about her presentation flooded the chat, such as “the best so far,” “excellent presentation,” “really helpful,” and “great, dynamic presentation.” But Jacqueline never makes anyone feel inferior or bad for not knowing something; rather, she loves making difficult concepts accessible, such as in her great presentation called “Deep learning isn’t hard, I promise.”

Her personal life is equally impressive: she has a wonderfully vibrant house in Seattle with her wife, son, two dogs, and three cats. I’m hoping that she might also one day adopt a certain co-author to fill out the very few empty spaces. She and her wife, Heather, have even given a presentation to a packed audience of 1,000 people eager to hear about how they used R to deploy machine learning models to production at T-Mobile. They also possibly have the best meet-cute story of all time: they met on the aforementioned show King of the Nerds, where Heather was also a competitor.

I’m very thankful to Jacqueline, who could have earned much more money for much less aggravation by doing anything other than writing this book with me. It is my hope that our work encourages aspiring and junior data scientists to become contributors to our community who are as great as Jacqueline is.